the path

Looking Downtown

I took this photo on Tuesday morning atop Rockefeller Center. It was extremely cold because of the 20 something temperature and wind 70 floors up.

Along with Kari I have started a new project to detect billiard balls using computer vision. It doesn’t sound like something that is too difficult to accomplish and I hope it isn’t — but it will be the first step in my idea of a full scale billiard playing robot. The first set of 9-ball test images can be found here.

It’s been quite a while since there’s been any action from me on here… I’ve been way too lax about posting, and too busy to be anything but. That isn’t an excuse because if the time wants to be found then it will eventually be found. I looked tonight and found some 600 spam comments — but that’s to be expected when I haven’t even checked the site in over a month — resulting in me having the moderate the comments so they won’t show up right away if posted.

The real purpose of me getting back into the swing of things is to share some good news. As it turns out, the array embedded hardware systems I’ve been designing and testing for months is going to be used in a demonstration at this year’s VLDB conference in Trondheim, Norway, at the end of next month. Apparently this is one of the premiere database conferences in the world so having something I designed be on show is an honor. I don’t exactly how it all fits in to a database conference but I’m leaving all that up to the software guys to integrate.

While evaluating Tuesday night, I spent the entire day yesterday thinking about what motivates my behavior. Not necessarily limited to the normal psychological influences of behavior like society and culture, but what helps me decide what seems like the best thing to do at any given time. Furthermore, why is it that it sometimes takes me a lot to realize the very little pleasures because they often get ignored?

Tuesday night I was sitting on Jenni’s couch playing Trivial Pursuit and I was having a lot of fun. Being around her is something I’m really going to miss once she heads off to Azerbaijan. After knowing her for a few years I have a level of comfort with her that doesn’t exist with many of the other people I hang around with. I’d probably get annoyed by her with enough exposure but I haven’t ever gotten to that point as we haven’t ever spent too much time around one another.

On Wednesday it irked me that this part of my life had been ignored on both sides and now that she’s leaving in a little under a month, the chances of us being like that ever again were slim. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the only reason we were like that Tuesday night was because she was in fact leaving. If there happened to be another month or two then that it wouldn’t have happened. I say that because it didn’t happen last month. There were still weeks that needed to pass before any strong sense of importance was felt by either party. Why does that urgency only surface when it can’t be denied? That goes against my idealistic view of how such interaction should be: not planned out, fun, and plentiful.

This time last year I was preparing for graduation because it was less than three weeks away. Little did I know that my grandad was coming from England (even though my mom did slip and tell me a few weeks in advance it was still a pleasant surprise). Tonight as I was looking through the pictures I remembered something he said to me a little bit before this photo: “I can’t promise I’ll make your wedding, Steve, but at least I’m here for this.” Even then I knew he was sick, but I didn’t really think twice about his statement. Never before has he missed anything life changing — my mother’s medical school graduation, the move from New Jersey in the summer of 1999 — and it make me unnerved to know that he never will physically be present to those kinds of events again. It’s been more than three months since he died and I still can’t help but rewind a year to this date in 2004 when he was still here.

The beginning of April for the past few years has brought about more stress than my body can handle. All of the semester’s work is coming to a close and invariably I catch cold or otherwise become unproductive. I was hoping this year would be different and that I could actually finish my term paper before the end of March, but I missed that goal and now am stuck having to finish the paper and present it on Thursday morning. I don’t know why I have such a hard time finishing projects because when I start them I am eager and always willing to put the time in. I guess in the end I grow bored of the same old thing and thus revert back to old habits.

The good news is after next Wednesday, April 13, I could almost be done with classes if I do well on the Digital Filters exam. The Machine Intelligence exams are already over with and the remaining item is the presentation which will be completed Wednesday night and given on Thursday. My independent study class has always taken the back seat and I hope to have my formal lecture material ready to be handed during the last week of classes.

Thinking back… I don’t even remember February. January was exciting because I was starting something new but after the second or third week all the way up until Spring Break I have no idea as to what I was doing. Furthermore, at the end of the week I’m usually so burned out that I can’t really recall each of the days discretely because they all seem to blend in to one another. What’s that about? I can’t wait for the first week in May — I think then I’ll try to get out of town for the entire week and take a real break.

From age 14 until this time last year I only wore disposable contact lenses. It was then that I purchased my third pair of glasses — and the first in over seven years. Since I got those, I’ve favored the spectacles over the contacts because wearing the contacts became a drag (having to take them out is not hard, I know). It’s rare when I put the lenses in nowadays and ever rarer when I wear them to bed. On Saturday morning I awoke and for about fifteen seconds I thought my terrible eyesight (-4.00 in both eyes) had been cured by some divine intervention. This ecstasy lasted only long enough for me to come back to reality. Well if yesterday wasn’t bad enough, it happened again today. The worst part is that I believed it more today than yesterday until yet again I realized what had happened. One day, most likely after surgery, my vision dream will come to fruition.

As a kid I used to love Legos, so much in fact that I loved Christmas and my birthday because most of the time I got some Lego related — my favorite being some medieval castle. One day I spent all my waking hours putting together a Lego city. It was small in size — around 4′ by 1′ — but took a lot of hard work from a youngster. It had a racetrack, high-rise, and houses for the little Lego people. That night my dad, and Uncle Mike came in late from a night at the Hitching Post and literally destroyed it. So I rebuilt it the next day and made it better… and so begins this exciting story.

I had enough Matchbox cars to fill up not only my Matchbox Toolbox carrying case but also another big box too. I loved having miniature car shows where I’d pick out my favorite toy cars and put them on display. I would then pretend there were rival car gang groups and they would all fight in a good versus evil style. It’d be interesting to look at those again because it would probably bring back some pretty funny memories.

At one time I was fascinated by video games. One Christmas morning I got the Nintendo gaming system (a big thing then) with the Power Pad for some Olympics style game. For some reason I remember my uncle (same one) being there and he and my dad running on it thinking it was the most pointless thing ever. It was, of course, but I was probably six or seven so it was the greatest thing for me at the time.

I can remember when I was about nine or ten playing with my action figures, I could come up with the most elaborate scenarios. I had this battle plane thing and I would get so lost in that whole thing. Looking back on it I find it kind of ridiculous, really. If there was no one to play with then I would simply make up an entire world to rid myself of boredom. I wish I could remember my characters’ names now because they were always cracked out — like Captain Seabass or something. I was a little too creative, I think.

I don’t know where that imagination went. It’s got to be around somewhere, because occasionally I have a flash of self-proclaimed brilliance. Now instead of play time antics and fantasy worlds, it usually comes in the form of written words or lengthy conversation. If I try to use that same childhood imagination to figure out what I want to do with my life (which at one time was an astronaut until I was old enough to learn I’d have a better chance of winning the lottery) I usually daydream about the past (as in right now) and purposefully ignore what lies ahead. I don’t want to think of it from a grown-up’s perspective because that will have meant I’ve given up being a kid and thus the end of youthful exuberance.

It’s been a while since I’ve put something meaningful to read on here because I haven’t been all too philosophical about anything ‘public.’ I need to start getting back to putting my thoughts down on paper instead of only thinking them.

Being the kind of person I want to be in all aspects is tough and if I set my goals too high I’m afraid I won’t ever reach them. Inversely, if I set them too low then I’d be limiting myself. Finding that balance has always been my problem (and I’m sure a lot of other people’s as well). Halfway through dinner I realized that on I’ve surpassed my initial goal of balancing graduate school with life and I haven’t set a new one. I think talking to someone at any depth for the first time brings that to the surface because otherwise those sorts of sentiments lay dormant. I can’t notice a gradual change in my physical appearance, but if I look at photographs from years ago I can tell I’m getting older. The same, for me, holds true when I look at how much I’ve grown as a person in the past five years. I left high school with a limited concept of my capabilities and now I feel as though I’m able to “be something.” What that something is will most likely be my next goal.

Over the past two days, there seems to be quite a bit of words and thought about a candle. Whether it was the person who purchased it, the guest who commented on it, or what has been crossing my mind the most: what it has come to represent.

This evening I was laying on my covers looking up and I noticed a familiar sight of the projectection of the lamp shade touching the ceiling. The smell of vanilla conjured up a few fleeting memories but most importantly the sense of tranquility through soft conversation. I can’t explain in words, but the chemical change of a burning wick and the surrounding molten wax never opened my eyes as much as it did in that moment.